This 'Omen' is so bad it's scary

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date. Yes, in case you've missed it, today is 06/06/06, perfect for Hollywood to deliver an otherwise pointless cabalistic blow to our heads. For this occasion, the blunt instrument is a remake of Richard Donner's legitimately scary 1976 horror flick, ``The Omen," about a couple unwittingly raising Satan's little boy.

Gregory Peck and Lee Remick played the couple in the original picture. Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles, both looking miserable, take the same parts in this new version, which John Moore has directed without much wit or feeling. The screenwriter for both movies is David Seltzer, who merely appears to have dusted off his original and handed it in to the studio. The first one was chilling. This remake is an icy bore.

It gets underway when an evil priest swaps the couple's newborn for a demon seed. He tells Roger Thorn (Schreiber) that their child died after labor and that this little orphan will make a perfect replacement. His wife, Katherine (Stiles), has no idea what's going on, but really, a mother always knows. Sort of. The adopted tot grows into Damien, a 6-year-old sourpuss played with one facial expression by Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, and Katherine's awakening to his evil has to be beaten into her -- chiefly by the boy himself.

To put it mildly, the Devil pulls some strings, landing Roger a job as the US ambassador in London. So he isn't around when Damien puts his increasingly clued-in mom in the hospital. (Ladies, when Satan's kid is riding his Big Wheel around your mansion, never water your plants perched on a chair overlooking a 100-foot drop.)

Another priest (Pete Postlethwaite) keeps showing up to warn Roger that something terrible is afoot. So does an omnipresent photographer (David Thewlis), who happens to be building a fetching photo library of all the Devil's victims.

Eventually the atheistic Roger comes around, and his suspicion turns ``The Omen" into a chase picture, not unlike ``The Da Vinci Code," in which he and the photographer try to solve the mystery. But Moore shows greater interest in concocting a chic-looking movie than in making our skin crawl, and the violently loud score works harder than he does to spook us. (It succeeds only in producing migraines.) Beyond the alluring production design and some tasteless allusions to 9/11 and the Challenger disaster, it's hard to explain why'd we need another ``Omen."

Since nearly every Catholic-minded horror movie in the last 30 years has cribbed from Donner's movie, this remake's attempts to shock and surprise seem monotonously by the book. Even if you missed the '76 version, you already know what's going on. Material this stupid and this familiar needs a touch of camp, but Mia Farrow, as Damien's unholy nanny, is the only participant who brings the goods.

Now that no one seems to have the patience, interest, or skill to build a suspenseful, horrifying horror film, there's nowhere for the genre's misogyny to hide. Moore, for instance, saves his inspired shot-making for Stiles's demise. There are attractive images of her brushing her teeth in a big white room (it's the Oral-B commercial from hell), and the sequence of her plummeting from that balcony is beautiful. Why would someone with Stiles's talent want such a thankless part?

Stiles is punched, scratched, dropped, and worse. The fear in her face seems real: That kid playing Damien is no boy, he's Chucky the killer doll from the ``Child's Play" movies. There's no prestige in this kind of acting for her. But at next year's MTV Movie Awards, she's a shoo-in to win Best Frightened Performance.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.